The Alchemy of Survival: One Woman's Journey by John E. Mack, M.D. with Rita S. Rogers, M.D.; Addison-Wesley: 238 pages; $17.95.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John E. Mack specializes in rough scultures rather than flat portraits.

This particular sculpture glorifies its subject because of her very position, but does not unduly flatter her, either. Through his genre, Mack leaves nothing out, and the roughness of his trade serves only to leave us in awe of the person we feel we have come to know, Rita S. Rogers, holocaust survivor.

Though Mack analyzes Rogers from cultural, historical, and psychological perspectives, the book is filled with her version, her quotes, her life as a Romanian Jewish teenager during World War II. I had a sense of her looking over his shoulder as he wrote his book.

And this, he writes, is the way she is. And maybe, part of the reason she miraculously survived. As a child of a cultured and well-to-do family, she was pampered. She was encouraged by her doting mother to do whatever she thought best. This included schooling, food, social life. As a result of what some would call being spoiled, Rita was strong-minded, adventurous, confident and a little arrogant.

These aspects of Roger's childhood and personality are what most intrigues Mack. Could this type of personality endow one with more survival skills? Mack looks this question up and down, but does not seem pleased at any answer. What gave Rogers the strength to rub dirt under her fingernails and pass herself off as a foundry worker is the same need to be the center of attention that Mack seems to find displeasing in a modern doctor.

Often, what Rogers did reached the point of foolhardiness: dodging curfews to go to the movies and fraternizing with non-Jews outside the prison-camp of Mogilev Podolskiy. She talked her way into just about everything, whether it had to do with physical or social survival.

Still, she survived the cattle cars, a disease-ridden prison camp, jail (this several times), and the iron curtain. A sense of culture, strong family ties, and a personality so strong she could stare down a murderous German soldier served Rogers well. Mack writes, "Rita's life stands as a challenge to those explanations of the personalities of strong and creative individuals which rely heavily on theories of intrapsychic conflict and strength derived from early hardship." But in the end, even Mack must admit that luck was foremost. Any one of the Rogers's qualities could have meant death for her.

Though Mack's psychological profile is provacative, he doesn't leave it at that. He also describes eastern European (particularly Jewish) culture. Ironically, before the war, Rogers's family thought it cultured and intellectual to speak German, to read German books and listen to German opera. This early indoctrination is part of Rita's "international" personality today; she feels no animosity for the Germans or for any other culture. Mixed within her bad memories are also good ones, of a German who saved her from drowning, of the faces of two soldiers who her family tried to rescue, of the Russians who liberated the prison camp.

Mack gives a detailed history of eastern Europe and the tossing around of small countries, the bargains made between powers and the events surrounding the closing of the iron curtain. And this is not a purely American viewpoint either; we see through the eyes of the people left behind, or those whose family and friends were long dead when we entered the war.

When I read "The Alchemy of Survival," I knew what the two people behind this book had in mind. I thought of a memorial statue, one fashioned almost crudely, one that shows the honored in unpretentious clothes, captured in a human pose, with a gleam in the eye and an aura of comradeship. Far from belittling, the fully-formed representation shows us the true heroism of one of our own.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Miramar College.